Contents

Description

Rogue's storyline was very light: the point of the game was to go down all levels of a dungeon, in a world based on Dungeons & Dragons, starting from the top, killing monsters and plundering treasures, until finding the Amulet of Yendor. Then, the player had to climb every level up. It was one of the first games to use a spatial representation of the world where the action unfolded instead of textual descriptions. This was possible using a C function library called Curses, and this brought important advancements into the cRPG and in general PC gaming genre.

Contrary to many other computer RPGs of the time, all levels were randomly generated. Rogue was intended to be played on Unix terminals. Thus, the dungeon was displayed in text mode, characters and monsters being represented by letters. Actions were issued by single keystrokes. Rogue defined the very roguelike genre. Random generation, basic plot, text (or tiled) based display still are the usual features of roguelikes.

The more direct descendant of rogue was Hack, although Larn and Moria are closely related to it as well.